Punk, Skirts, Balaclavas: A Russian Revolution

The problem with staging a show trial is that the main actor has little incentive to follow the script. Yet that’s never tempered Russia’s thirst for judicial theater. In 1964, a Soviet court demanded to know who had given Joseph Brodsky permission to write poetry. That future Nobel laureate’s retort: “I think that it ... comes from God,” became a classic of artistic defiance.

Two years later, the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel stood accused of purveying “slanderous inventions.” The defendants’ principled stance did not save them from the Gulag, but it earned the support of people like Hannah Arendt, who called the proceedings “an ugly reminder of something one had hoped had passed into history.”

Still, the Kremlin keeps turning its enemies into martyrs. In 2003, the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, ordered the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had amassed his billions in the post-Soviet chaos without much regard for law. The privations Mr. Khodorkovsky faced in prison made him an unlikely symbol of Russia’s plight.

A decade later, the courts remain “Russia’s sole venue for political conversation,” as Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and frequent contributor to The New York Times, writes in her urgent new book, “Words Will Break Cement.” Her subject is the punk band Pussy Riot, three of whose members were given two-year prison sentences for their minute-long “punk prayer” performed in a cathedral in 2012. They are free now, along with Mr. Khodorkovsky, granted amnesty by a Kremlin many think is eager to burnish its image before the Winter Olympics in Sochi. This damning book punctures that effort.

Ms. Gessen, who recently moved to New York after working in Moscow for many years, is a largely dispassionate observer in “Words Will Break Cement,” at least more so than in her excellent “Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,” in which she left no doubts about her feelings for Mr. Putin. She is not the first to tell Pussy Riot’s story, as there’s no Iron Curtain to keep the West in the dark anymore. But she tells it more thoroughly, her anger at Russia’s “overwhelming mediocrity” scorching every page. She corresponded with the three jailed Pussy Riot members, visiting one in a prison camp, in addition to interviewing their families and activists. Much here will be new to the American reader. All of it is infuriating.

The three sound like something dreamed up in Hollywood. Nadya Tolokonnikova came to Moscow State University to study philosophy, though she disdained her peers’ “lack of passion,” as she would later tell Ms. Gessen. Yekaterina Samutsevich worked as an engineer on a nuclear submarine before enrolling in photography school, where she took to chronicling electoral abuses. Her art caught the attention of Ms. Tolokonnikova and her husband, Petya, both then part of an art-protest group called Voina, or War. They were eventually joined by the “preternaturally pure” Maria Alyokhina, whose earthy vibe contrasted with Ms. Tolokonnikova’s fierce idealism.

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Masha GessenCreditSvenya Generalova

In the summer of 2011, they and several other women formed Pussy Riot. Adorned effulgently in balaclavas and dresses, they sought to awaken a somnolent society. They did it through noise, because, as Ms. Gessen writes, “there were no words left.” An outraged reporter described them as “girls in face masks with bad voices they use to shout songs.” Yeah, pretty much.

In November 2011, Pussy Riot staged its first action, “Free the Cobblestones,” a performance in the Moscow subway that suggested that free elections were an illusion. More bold was a Red Square performance on Jan. 20, 2012, whose title roughly translates as “Putin Is Wetting Himself.” Taking place just as Mr. Putin was about to reclaim the presidency from Dmitri A. Medvedev, it made Pussy Riot famous — and led to several arrests.

Emboldened, Pussy Riot targeted the Russian Orthodox Church. Its patriarch, Kirill I, was rumored to have worked with the K.G.B. and, in a show of unchurchly ostentation, wore a $30,000 Breguet watch. Mr. Putin’s rule, he pronounced, was “God’s miracle.”

On Feb. 21, 2012, five of Pussy Riot’s members entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, where they performed their punk prayer “Mother of God, Drive Putin Away,” dancing and genuflecting, to the horror of a few churchgoers, before being dragged out by guards. A video of the action was promptly released, making Pussy Riot heroes in the growing movement protesting what Ms. Gessen calls “Russia’s ominous slide into the Dark Ages.”

The hammer is never slow to fall in Russia — and it never falls softly. After being chased out of the cathedral, the women went into hiding. Five days later, on what’s known as Forgiveness Sunday in Orthodoxy, Pussy Riot was charged with hooliganism, the “rude disruption of social order.” Two members left the country. Three stayed behind and, by mid-March, were arrested. Ms. Gessen deems what follows “a Soviet political trial repeated as farce,” yet holds her own dismay in abeyance. As the defendants sat in an “airless stall” of glass, the prosecution produced witnesses who recounted, in horror, the women’s “devilish jerkings” and the “huge moral damage” the performance caused. Pussy Riot’s lawyers vacillated between “fumbling” and “speechifying,” Ms. Gessen writes, thinking victory could be had via “endless tweets.”

It wasn’t all comic noir. Ms. Tolokonnikova was singularly eloquent in her closing statement: “Rigidity is always the opposite of the search for truth.” That didn’t soften the judge’s heart, nor did support from musicians like Madonna. On Aug. 17, 2012, the women were sentenced to two years in prison, and though Ms. Samutsevich was freed two months later on appeal (she had been stopped by guards from performing in the cathedral), Ms. Tolokonnikova and Ms. Alyokhina, parents both, were sent to prison camps.

Little seems to have changed in Russia’s penal system since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in 1962. In an open letter released last fall, Ms. Tolokonnikova described how a warden at her penal colony informed her, “You should know that when it comes to politics, I am a Stalinist.” Her fellow inmates were “speechless slaves” who worked inhuman hours and were often denied the use of a toilet. Both women went on hunger strikes; some press reports wondered if Ms. Tolokonnikova was dead.

She is not only alive but also quite garrulous, now that she is free. At a news conference with Ms. Alyokhina in late December, Ms. Tolokonnikova was uncowed: “Our attitude to Putin hasn’t changed at all. The message of our action in the cathedral is still valid.” That probably wasn’t in the Kremlin’s script.

Alexander Nazaryan is a senior writer at Newsweek.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: Punk, Skirts, Balaclavas: A Russian Revolution. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe